Smitty

This daily strip follows a schoolboy and his teacher through classroom mishaps. The artist uses the emerging visual language of newspaper comics: rectangular panels in sequence, speech balloons for dialogue, and sequential action that unfolds left to right. The gag relies on the gap between the teacher's assignment—draw a tree accurately—and the students' crude attempts, a structure common to humor strips of the era. *Smitty* appeared in newspapers alongside *Bringing Up Father* and *The Gumps*, strips that established the daily comic as essential to the funny pages and proved that recurring characters and serialized humor could sustain reader interest across months and years.